Legendary Comics Writer Alan Moore on Superheroes, The League, and Making Magic

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Legendary Comics Writer Alan Moore on Superheroes, The League, and Making Magic

Wired: What's the significance of the superhero? What's interesting about the iconography or the archetypes?

Alan Moore: I don't actually think that anything is, at the moment. I don't really think that very much is interesting about the superhero as an archetype. I've been distanced from the whole concept for quite a while now, but I've been considering it.

It has occurred to me that the superhero really only originates in America. That seems to be the only country that has produced this phenomenon. Yes, we have had knockoffs of American superheroes originating in this country and presumably in other parts of the world, but they're not natural to this environment. They're an alien species. And I've thought about it and wondered why that was. And I wonder—perhaps this is being too simplistic, I don't know, but I wonder if the root of the emergence of the superhero in American culture might have something to do with a kind of an ingrained American reluctance to engage in confrontation without massive tactical superiority. I mean—does the term 7/7 mean anything to you at all?

Wired: Sure.

Moore: During the 7/7 bombings over here, it was announced a couple days later that as soon as the first two trains had gone up, all of the American forces that were in London were recalled to safe distance outside the M24 orbital motorway. After a few days, when they realized that it was safe to go back into London, they realized also that it looked kind of bad, sort of rushing out of the capital at the first sign of any trouble when the main reason for the bombing was England's support of America in the Iraq war.

It does seem to me that massive tactical superiority might be a key to the superhero phenomenon. That, if it's a military situation, then you've got carpet bombing from altitude, which is kind of the equivalent of having come from Krypton as a baby and to have gained unusual strength and the ability to fly because of Earth's lesser gravity. I don't know, that may be a simplistic interpretation, but that's the way I tend to see superheroes today.

That wasn't what it used to mean. That wasn't what it used to mean to me when I was a child. What I was getting out of it was this unbridled world of the imagination, and the superhero was a perfect vehicle for that when I was much younger. But looking at the superhero today, it seems to me an awful lot like Watchmen without the irony, that with Watchmen we were talking very much about the potential abuses of this kind of masked vigilante justice and the kind of people that it would in all likelihood attract if these things were taking place in a more realistic world. But that was not meant approvingly.

I have to say that I haven't seen a comic, much less a superhero comic, for a very, very long time now—years, probably almost a decade since I've really looked at one closely. But it seems to be that things that were meant satirically or critically in Watchmen now seem to be simply accepted as kind of what they appear to be on the surface. So yeah, I'm pretty jaundiced about the entire "caped crusader" concept at the moment.

If you remember back in the '80s, there was an incredible spate of monumentally lazy headlines in British and American magazine and newspapers. But also something along the lines of "Bam! Sock! Pow! Comic Books Aren't Just for Kids Anymore." I used to think those headlines were just irritating, but it's only recently that I've looked back and realized how incredibly inaccurate they were. Comics had not grown up, bam-sock-pow. What had happened was that you'd gotten two or three comics that had gotten, perhaps for the first time, serious adult elements in their compositions. This was judged as miraculous as a dog riding a bicycle back in the 1980s. It doesn't matter whether he's riding it particularly well; it matters that he's riding it at all.

I think that a lot of people, irrespective of whether they'd ever read a book like Watchmen, took it basically as a form of license. I think there were a surprising number of people out there who secretly longed to keep up with the adventures of Green Lantern but who felt they would have been socially ostracized if they had been seen reading a comic book in a public place. With the advent of books like Watchmen, I think these people were given license by the term graphic novel. Everybody knew that comics were for children and for intellectually subnormal people, whereas graphic novel sounds like a much more sophisticated proposition.

That sounds like the kind of thing a 30-year-old—or a 40-year-old, even—could be caught reading on the tube, upon the subway, without embarrassment. When I started work for DC Comics, I figured that my readership was probably somewhere between—they'd previously been 9 to 13 years old, and now they were around 13 to 18. The average age of the audience now for comics, and this has been the case since the late 1980s, probably is late thirties to early fifties—which tends to support the idea that these things are not being bought by children. They're being bought in many cases by hopeless nostalgics or, putting the worst construction on it, perhaps cases of arrested development who are not prepared to let their childhoods go, no matter how trite the adventures of their various heroes and idols.

Wired: When you were working on your later stuff for DC, were you still aiming for that young of an audience?

Moore: By the end of my original tenure with DC, I was a much younger man, and I was still following the basic agendas that I'd decided upon when I was a part of the emergent phenomenon of comic book fandom in this country in the 1960s. I think 1967 was probably the first British comic convention, and so it was very much infused with the spirit of the time, which was very progressive. With the American conventions, which had started sometime earlier, I think that there was an element of nostalgia that undercut that American comic phenomenon right from the outset. Over here, yes, there was certainly that element as well. But, like I say, it was the 1960s. Most of the comic fans I met at the time were 14- or 15-year-old proto-hippies, as was I. They were very interested in the progressive spirit of the time.

So, those were the agendas that we were following then. We thought it would be a great idea if comics could be recognized as the wonderful medium that we secretly knew them to be. And when I say "we," I'm talking about the 50 actual people who turned up at those early conventions, which was pretty much the sum total of everybody in this country who'd ever heard of American comics. But back then our agenda was this progressive notion that, wouldn't it be terrific if people were to get involved with comics who could make them more adult, more grown up, to show the kind of themes they were capable of handling? So this was the agenda that, 20 years later, I was still following toward the end of my first DC run.

At the time I thought that a book like Watchmen would perhaps unlock a lot of potential creativity, that perhaps other writers and artists in the industry would see it and would think, "This is great, this shows what comics can do. We can now take our own ideas and thanks to the success of Watchmen we'll have a better chance of editors giving us a shot at them." I was hoping naively for a great rash of individual comic books that were exploring different storytelling ideas and trying to break new ground.

That isn't really what happened. Instead it seemed that the existence of Watchmen had pretty much doomed the mainstream comic industry to about 20 years of very grim and often pretentious stories that seemed to be unable to get around the massive psychological stumbling block that Watchmen had turned out to be, although that had never been my intention with the work.

When I returned to work for—well, I didn't return. I was kind of press-ganged. I had DC buying the company I had just signed contracts with, which is flattering in one way and very creepy in another. It's like being stalked by a very rich demented girlfriend who can just buy your entire street in order to be close to you.

When I found myself working, even remotely, under the auspices of DC, I had very different intentions. Well, maybe they were the same intentions: to do progressive comics that adults could enjoy. But by then I'd become very tired of the wave of grimness that seemed to have been unleashed by Watchmen.

When I was working upon the ABC books, I wanted to show different ways that mainstream comics could viably have gone, that they didn't have to follow Watchmen and the other 1980s books down this relentlessly dark route. It was never my intention to start a trend for darkness. I'm not a particularly dark individual. I have my moments, it's true, but I do have a sense of humor. With the ABC books I was trying to do comics that would have perhaps appealed to an intelligent 13-year-old, such as I'd been, and would still satisfy the contemporary readership of 40-year-old men who probably should know better. But I wanted to sort of do comics that would be accessible to a much wider range of people, and would still be intelligent even if they were primarily children's adventure stories, such as the Tom Strong books.

So, although I was still committed to progress, which I think was evidenced by some of the very experimental things we did in Tomorrow Stories with Greyshirt and Cobweb, some of the incredibly experimental things we did in Promethea, which I think pushed the capacities, the capabilities, of a flimsy comic book about as far as I have ever personally pushed them. Some of the things we did on Promethea were so smugly clever that I'm still basking in the radiance three or four years later.

But it was a change of emphasis. I didn't want to spark off another wave of frankly miserable stories about psychotic vigilantes battling it out with equally psychotic villains. I wanted to do stuff that had a fresher feel to it, had a bit of a morning atmosphere. And I think, to a degree, we succeeded, but of course it all ended in tears.

Now I'm pretty much divorced from the comics medium. Of course, it's a medium I will always love, and I'm still working on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but I don't think either Kevin [O'Neill, the artist] or I see that in the context of comics anymore. For me, it's one of the things I do, like the new novel, or the music I intermittently work on, or the book of magic. These are all things I do. I don't think of them in the context of the different media that I do them in. I still do think of new things to do with the comic medium, but now they're all pretty much sublimated into the League, which we're having a great time with.

We're being as wildly experimental as possible. The first book of the third volume is actually a musical, an opera. It's probably the blackest and most destructive of any of the League books so far, which included the aerial bombardment of London in the first issue and the invasion by Martians in the second volume. This is somehow even blacker than that.

But it has got a lot of very rousing songs running all the way through it. Because—as ever with the League—we tend to base the adventures upon the fictional landscape that was around at that particular time. Since this is set in 1910, we found the idea of bringing in Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill irresistible. So I've rewritten the libretto for a number of the more gutsy and dark and powerful and sardonic Kurt Weill numbers. There's a new "Mack the Knife," a new "Pirate Jenny," a new "MacHeath's Plea From the Gallows," a new "What Keeps Mankind Alive." The epilogue of the second part of the three-part volume is set in 1976, where we have a punk version of the "Ballad of Immoral Earnings" called "Immoral Earnings in the UK." I was worried at first that this was going to turn The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen into any number of bad Elvis films where, like, it's just about keeping the plot credibility together and then someone throws Elvis a guitar and everyone starts singing. It destroys any possible reality that's been built up in the reader's mind, and I was worried about that happening with League.

I just thought, "Is the kind of sense of drama we want to create in this book going to be undermined by the fact that we have characters bursting into song?" But the way it's worked is that it tends to make the scenes hyperreal rather than less real, just because of the incredible darkness and bitterness of Brecht's vision. We're very pleased with the way this particular experiment has worked out. And hopefully in future books we'll be continuing to push the boundaries as much as we can. But that's pretty much the full extend of my involvement with comics at the moment.

Wired:The League is interesting because of its dependence on that vast canon. Everything from pulp up through every novel that's been written gets hologrammed.

Moore: In the first two volumes we were dealing mainly with characters from literature, because characters from literature were all that were around up until roughly the end of the 19th century. With this one, the first one set in 1910, we're using characters from the stage as well as literature. We're using the whole Threepenny Opera storyline. With the second one, set in 1969, we've got access to all of the films and television that were around then. The third part, set in the present day—2008, 2009—we have characters from all of the new media that have evolved over the past 30 years.

It is interesting—it is an expanding cast of characters, and I suppose we're attempting to come up with a kind of unified field theory of culture that actually links up all of these various works, whether they're high culture or low culture or no culture.

Wired: How do you position yourself on the continuum from homage to parody to commentary? If you're engaging with all of these other texts to try to do what they did, to talk about what they did?

Moore: It varies. Like, for example, with the Brecht material we've woven this fairly seamlessly into the existing continuity of The League. Our "Pirate Jenny" is not quite the rather tragic, idle fantasist of Brecht's original. I'll leave it to the readers themselves to see this themselves before I go much further.

It's a matter of tying these things in. Sometimes they are lesser-known works that we think should be better known, and we're including them in the hope that people might actually go out and pick up the original books. Sometimes we have characters who are greatly revered that we feel are perhaps too revered, and we would like to give a more accurate picture of them. As an example, there would be the character in The Black Dossier who bears a considerable resemblance to Ian Fleming's James Bond. Well, it's Ian Fleming's James Bond, actually. But what we were trying to do is show the origins of this character, to show what a totally unpleasant character at its inception James Bond was—a nasty misogynist, some very suspect sexual inclinations, not at all the suave character the movies rounded him out into. We wanted the original James Bond, warts and all. We thought it would be interesting to connect up the various spy books, spy movies, spy television series that were so prevalent during the '60s, and to put them together into a coherent network, with a coherent storyline running through them that would let me comment on some of the realities of the intelligence services and their work in our world.

We were able to subtly comment upon things like the fact that a number of prominent MI-5 spies who were recruited from universities or public schools turned out to be double agents, traitors for the Russians—notably Kim Philby. We thought it was very interesting that Kim Philby was a lifelong friend of writer Graham Greene, who based his character Harry Lime for the screenplay for The Third Man upon Philby. And Philby himself was only called Kim because his father was identifying him with Rudyard Kipling's fictitious Kim, who had been a spy in the Great Game in Afghanistan in the 1880s.

Over here, we had already unearthed two double agents: Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean. There were rumors there might be a third double agent. In the 1960s, I remember headlines that said, "Kim Philby is the Third Man." They were completely oblivious to the fact that Kim Philby actually was the Third Man, that he was whom Graham Greene based the character on.

George Orwell had said that he'd based all of the apparatchiks of the secret state of Big Brother upon the prefects at Eton, the public school he attended. We also found out that Frank Richards, the gambling addict who wrote the Billy Bunter schoolboy books, had gotten into an ill-advised public spat with George Orwell when Orwell had written a critique of the Billy Bunter books saying they were racist, imperialistic, treated all foreigners and minorities as figures of fun, and made all these other fairly accurate observations about the Billy Bunter books.

To which Richards ill-advisedly responded that Mr. Orwell was being terribly unfair about his harmless schoolboy frolics, and as for treating foreigners as figures of fun, well, they are. Which was not the best reply to make to someone like George Orwell. In The Black Dossier, we were able to comment upon all these things. And, sometimes The League will, although it's set in a fantasy world, making some point that actually seems quite relevant to the world we're in at present.

I know that when I was writing the second volume about the Martian invasion is when we were just going into the still-ongoing war in Afghanistan. I know that there were elements of the things I was seeing on the news that were playing into my thinking, which in turn was playing into some of the dialog in some of the scenes in that volume of The League.

So, yes, it is a massive world of every fictional character that has ever not existed. And it is, on one level, a really over-elaborate literary game. But we are also able to find all sorts of resonances. The reason why these characters have endured is that they're resonant. If you extrapolate upon their possible adventures and have them meeting each other, if you do it right, you can amplify that resonance and make them still resonant to the world of today. The kind of misogyny that is exemplified by James Bond is still a large part of some quarters of the modern male psyche and probably still bears mentioning and talking about. Some of the imperialist tendencies that would have been prevalent during Allan Quatermain's original era are just as appropriate when we discuss them in terms of today. Perhaps it's a different country or a different global situation that we're talking about, but the basic principals are fairly timeless, fairly enduring.

So, yes, it is a big literary game, but it is one that lets us touch upon a surprising amount of stuff that's in some way relevant to the contemporary world. Given that we've got the whole world of fiction from the beginning until the end of time as our playground and given that we've got potentially every character that's ever existed somewhere in the offstage cast of our novel, then I think Kevin and I, we've certainly got an awful lot of ideas of things we can do in the future with The League. I don't think we're going to run out of possibilities for a considerable amount of time.

Wired: Could you do it in another medium?

Moore: No. Otherwise I'd have done them in another medium. I really don't think that The League would—well, it could have worked. There was a time I would have said that if any of my books could work as films, it would have been that first volume of The League. It was pretty much structured so it could have been made straight into a film, and it would have been as powerful as it was in the original publication. But that is to overlook the proclivities of contemporary Hollywood, where I really simply don't believe that any of my books could be benefited in any way by being turned into films. In fact, quite the opposite. The things I was trying to instill in those books were generally things that were only appropriate to the comics medium.

They were only about the comics medium, in a certain sense. To transplant them to the screen is going to chop off a good 30 or 40 percent of the reason why I wanted to do the work in the first place.

Jerusalem, this enormous novel I'm working on, which I'm two-thirds of the way through and it's already got to be somewhere around 1,500 pages, it's something that could only be done as a novel—and as an incredibly long novel. This wouldn't work as a comic strip. It's not got the right pace for a comic strip. It's something that's been designed to work as prose and occasional bits of poetry, just as The League is designed to work as a comic book—or a graphic novel, if everybody insists.

A lot of the effects in The League, the things that everybody remembers, they're kind of peculiar to the comic book. If you make The League into a film, even if you continue to, say, "remain faithful to my story or my dialog"—I mean, that is so unlikely as to be absolutely impossible, but say that that was to happen. What about Kevin's artwork? Kevin's artwork is so integral to the whole feel of The League that it couldn't be done with anyone other than Kevin. I think that he is probably one of the greatest and most individual artists working in the medium at the moment because his influences, his styles, come more from British illustration, British comics, than they come from the other side of the Atlantic. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but an awful lot of the people over here, myself included, were probably more influenced by the American material when we were growing up than we were by what was, in retrospect, brilliant British material. Kevin has always had an absurdist, grotesque British undercurrent to his work.

I think the material he's doing on this new volume—I know I say this with every new volume of The League—but I think it's Kevin's best work yet. But it always is. I really can't say anything different. It's extraordinary. He's surpassed himself again.

In a film, it's not a Kevin O'Neill drawing. I don't care how much CGI there is in it. It's not a Kevin O'Neill drawing. When I am thinking about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it's Kevin's drawings that I want to see, Kevin's storytelling, or the storytelling that is the combination of both of our efforts. These are the things that are important to me about The League.

It's like the idea about the Spirit film that's being done. I mean, I would have thought that it was fairly obvious that The Spirit is not about a guy who wears a blue mask and who fights crime from his supposed grave in a cemetery. What The Spirit is actually about is the panels on the page, the way that the eye moves from one panel to another. It's from the innovative shapes and layouts and designs that Will Eisner brought to the medium. You can't translate that into a film. Much as Eisner loved the film medium and tried to get as many techniques to comics as possible, there are things about the Will Eisner page you simply cannot translate back into cinema. I think Will would have certainly been intelligent enough to know that.

I think that adaptation is largely a waste of time in almost any circumstances. There probably are the odd things that would prove me wrong. But I think they'd be very much the exception. If a thing works well in one medium, in the medium that it has been designed to work in, then the only possible point for wanting to realize it on "multiple platforms," as they say these days, is to make a lot of money out of it. There is no consideration for the integrity of the work, which is rather the only thing as far as I'm concerned.

I've got enough money to be comfortable. I live comfortably, I can pay the bills at the end of every month. I don't want a huge amount of money by diluting something that I happen to be rather proud of at its outset. That pretty much describes my attitude toward the idea of any of my works being realized in another form, really.

Wired: You've had the double problem of not only the difficulty of adaptation, but also having suffered through some pretty egregious adaptations.

Moore: I've never watched any of the adaptations of my books. I've never wanted to, and there's absolutely no chance of me doing so in the future. So I haven't really suffered through them, although there has been a certain amount of irritation and outrageous behavior on the part of the comic industry and the movie industry that I have suffered through. But I've gone into this at bitter and ranting length elsewhere. I'm sure that people can look up the relevant articles have they a wish to.

My books are still the same books as they were before they were made into films. The books haven't changed. I'm reminded of the remark by, I think it was Raymond Chandler, where he was asked about what he felt about having his books "ruined" by Hollywood. And he led the questioner into his study and showed him all the books there on the bookshelf, and said, Look—there they all are. They're all fine. They're fine. They're not ruined. They're still there. And I think that's pretty much the attitude I take. If the books are as good as I think they are, then they are the things that will endure. And if the films are as bad as I think they are, then they are the things that will not endure. So, I suppose we'll see at the end of the day, whenever that is.

Wired: Among the interviews on the documentary film Mindscape of Alan Moore, you talked about trying to explain some of this to the director, Terry Gilliam.

Moore: I think that Terry understood my point. When we did meet—which was mainly just because I thought it would be really good fun to meet Terry Gilliam, and so it proved—Mr. Gilliam did ask me how I would go about translating Watchmen into a film, and I said to him, "If anybody had asked me, Terry, I would have advised them not to." I think Terry is an intelligent man and came to that conclusion himself. And I think he said something to that effect, that he thought it was something probably best left as a comic and shouldn't be made into a film.

This has been pretty much my attitude for a long, long time now. It's just that my attitude has probably hardened and gotten more ingrained as my arteries have hardened and I've grown older. I'm a bit more vehement and vociferous than when I was a callow youth of around 30.

Wired: Can you be more specific about what the things that comics as a medium do better than other media?

Moore: One thing is that with the comics medium, it has been proven—I believe by Pentagon tests in the late '80s—that comics are actually the best medium for imparting information to somebody in a form that they will retain and remember. That's not just me saying that, that's the Pentagon. I personally feel—and this is just pseudo-scientific hippie bullshit—I feel this might be because the unit of currency of what used to be called our left brain is the word. Our left brain is what goes about speech and rationality. The unit of currency for our right brain, conversely, would be the image, because the right brain is preverbal.

So perhaps it is because of the combination of words and images in a readable form that comics does have this unique power. Now, of course, movies are a combination of words and images, but they have a completely different structure and completely different way of working. With a movie you are being dragged through the scenario at a relentless 24 frames a second. With a comic book you can dart your eyes back to a previous panel, or you can flip back a couple of pages to check whether there is some reference in the dialog to a scene that happened earlier.

You can also spend as much time as you want absorbing every image. This is especially true of something like Watchmen, where I was trying to take advantage of Dave Gibbons' brilliant capacity as a former surveyor for including incredible amounts of detail in every tiny panel, so we could choreograph every little thing. The little symbols and signs appearing in the background, every little touch could be choreographed to the last detail, and we knew that the audience—because they'd be reading at their own pace—would be able to study each panel and to take in these almost subliminal details. Even the best director in the world, even a person as talented as Terry Gilliam, could not possibly get that amount of information into a few frames of a movie. Even if they did, it would have zipped past far too quickly. Because the audience at the movie theater is not in control of the experience in the same way somebody reading is.

One of my big objections to film as a medium is that it's much too immersive, and I think that it turns us into a population of lazy and unimaginative drones. The absurd lengths that modern cinema and its CGI capabilities will go in order to save the audience the bother of imagining anything themselves is probably having a crippling effect on the mass imagination. You don't have to do anything. With a comic, you're having to do quite a lot. Even though you've got pictures there for you, you're having to fill in all the gaps between the panels, you're having to imagine characters voices. You're having to do quite a lot of work. Not quite as much work as with a straight unillustrated book, but you're still going to do quite a lot of work.

I think the amount of work we contribute to our enjoyment of any piece of art is a huge component of that enjoyment. I think that we like the pieces that engage us, that enter into a kind of dialog with us, whereas with film you sit there in your seat and it washes over you. It tells you everything, and you really don't need to do a great deal of thinking. There are some films that are very, very good and that can engage the viewer in their narrative, in its mysteries, in its kind of misdirections. You can sometimes get films where a lot of it is happening in your head. Those are probably good films, but they're not made very much anymore.

There seems to be an audience that demands everything be explained to them, that everything be easy. And I don't think that's doing us any good as a culture. The ease with which we can accomplish or conjure any possible imaginable scenario through CGI is almost directly proportionate to how uninterested we're becoming in all of this. I can remember Ray Harryhausen's animated skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts. I can remember Willis O'Brien's King Kong. I can remember being awed at the artistry that had made those things possible. Yes, I knew how it was done. But it looked so wonderful. These days I can see half a million Orcs coming over a hill and I am bored. I am not impressed at all. Because, frankly, I could have gotten someone, a passerby on the street, who could have gotten the same effect if you'd given them half a million dollars to do it. It removes artistry and imagination and places money in the driver's seat, and I think it's a pretty straight equation—that there is an inverse relationship between money and imagination.

If you haven't got any money, you're going to need lots and lots of imagination. Which is why you'll get brilliant movies by people working upon a shoestring, like the early John Waters movies. People are pushed into innovation by the restrictions of their budget. The opposite is true if they have $100 million, say, pulling a figure out of the air, to spend upon their film, then they somehow don't see the need for giving it a decent story or decent storytelling. It seems like those values just go completely out the window. There's an inverse relationship there.

Wired: That's a different axis than the intrinsic capabilities of the medium. That has to do with whether you screw it up. It's possible to do a good comic book and a bad comic book.

Moore: Of course, and it's possible to do a good film and a bad film. It's just that I don't see an awful lot of good films or good comic books, which considering the immense amounts of money that are pumped into the production of these things, I think I would ideally like a much better success ratio. Yes, sort of big films with their budgets of $100 million-plus, if they are successes then they make back quite a bit for the studio, I guess, but this is after six or seven that really haven't made back their outlay. You have to be thinking of this in terms of its environmental and economic impact. I would have thought, particularly in the current climate, where the world economy does seem to be circling the drain, we might have to start thinking about handling our culture differently. We might have to be more conservative in throwing these huge amounts of money at our movie directors, at our actors, at our sports heroes, or, hey, our comic book writers.

Although we're not that guilty. We don't really get the same as the sports heroes or movie stars it has to said. We might have to start rethinking all this. Is it really worth spending all that money? Wasting all those resources? I mean, $100 million, that would pretty much sort out the horrifying flood damage in Haiti. I heard that figure quoted the other day. We might have to start rearranging our priorities and not just trying to anesthetize ourselves with endless television shows and movies because we're bored with our lives in the filthy rich Western world. We might have to change our priorities a little bit. If we are going to spend our money upon film, then let's start valuing the people that produce wonderful things with very little to go on. Let's stop being so childishly awed by what are essentially fireworks displays.

Most films that I see it seems that the level of criticism that they are expecting is on the level of a fireworks display. It's ooh and ah. Those seem to be the only responses that are appropriate to most modern films. I think we're in for a period of cultural revaluation. I certainly hope that's true, because I think if we're not, we're in for a period of cultural damnation. I think that we're fairly evidently heading to hell in a hand basket, and we have got to change our priorities. We've got to rethink this entire thing, and I think that rethinking our culture may be a part of that. I certainly hope so.

Wired: You mentioned Jerusalem and your music. Is there anything else I should know about?

Moore: There is the Bumper Book of Magic, which I am working on with my friend and inspiration Steve Moore—no relation. We are hoping that when we get it finished, in probably a couple of years, that it will be the most lucid, most beautiful, and probably most informative and funny grimoire that anybody has ever produced. It will be the first time a book of this nature, a huge compendium of magic which explains it in theory, in practice, which explains its history, and which includes all sorts of other wonderful features—it will be the first time this has ever been done for a mass market.

All of the previous magicians who've published grimoires have done it for an esoteric elite, and it's mainly been done in fairly opaque language that would only be comprehensible to people with already a fair amount of arcane knowledge. What we are trying to do is to make this, as I say, completely lucid, to demystify it, and at the same time to restore it to the position of reverence that we think that it should be in.

One of the things that has been the most fun is that part of the book, a strand that runs through the book, is a series of one-page features called "Old Moore's Lives of the Great Enchanters," where we start off with the dancing sorcerer: the cave illustration from Les Trois Freres caves in France, which is an antlered, dancing shaman figure. We take this as the first recorded magician. And we do a piece about the likelihood of Neolithic shamanism, and its world view. We move on through the Persian magi up through pretty much all of the important, famous magicians in history. We found out some incredible things just from researching these things. We were probably complacent because we assumed that we already knew about these things and these people. But we found out an incredible amount of new information.

We found out where kabbalah came from. It's not Hebrew at all, it's Pythagorean Greek. It was Pythagoras who first suggested adding three spheres to the classical seven spheres. He said, Yeah that's great, but you need another three spheres. You need one to represent the Earth, you need one to represent the six stars of the Zodiac, and one to represent the Primum Mobile—the first stirrings, or the origins of the universe, the Big Bang. It still obviously has a Hebrew element in its construction, but what happened is that the Pythagoreans had this system outlined, 10 spheres, each with their correspondencies. But this would have been translated into various languages, including Hebrew, in Alexandria around 100 BC to 100 AD. And there were scholars from all over the world passing through Alexandria. What must have happened is that Hebrew scholars picked up this Pythagorean stuff and realized they had a base counting system of 10, which would have made it appropriate to their mathematics, and that they could draw 22 lines between the 10 spheres, representing the 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet. And they took it, and ran with it, and developed kabbalah as it is today. But the roots were originally Pythagorean.

We found out who Faust was. And how the rather muddled story of Dr. Faust the evil magician actually evolved. We're pretty pleased with ourselves. We've even found out that Dr. Dee's Enochian magic, which was the names of angels that were written backwards in an invented magical alphabet, that he was actually taking the idea from Paracelsus who had a magical alphabet with which he used to write the names of angels backwards. This is something neither one of us had ever read in any consideration of John Dee. So we're really excited.

We seem to be turning up something new with every new enchanter we look at. It's a very fun book to do. It will include a complete tarot deck that I shall be working on with Jose Villarrubia. The basic thinking behind the tarot deck is that, if it's not as good as the Aleister Crowley soft deck, then it's not really worth bothering with. That's the one to beat or to equal. There's not much point in doing one not as good as that. That's the level we're setting the bar at. We're hoping to have a fold-out kabbalah board game. The winner is basically the first one that reaches enlightenment, as long as they don't make a big thing of it. Also, Melinda [Gebbie, Moore's partner] will also be contributing a pop-up temple for today's modern magus on the move, a little portable shrine.

We want this thing to have a lot of really fun inserts, fun features. Something that would delight a child. We want to make this not only a perfectly lucid and accurate book about magic, but we really want to make it a book about magic that would not disappoint an 8-year-old child if they came across it. Back when I was a child and I first heard about magic, then I kind of knew instinctively what a book of magic would be. It would be unimaginably wonderful. It would have fantastic things in it. It would be much better than the children's comics annuals I got at Christmas, and they were pretty wonderful. That is very much what we've tried to achieve. We want this to be magic that will be accessible to intelligent, modern adults. And we also want it to be magic that 8-year-old children will recognize as magic, as being as beautiful and glorious and entertaining as they had always hoped that magic would turn out to would be.

There are other bits and pieces going on. I've just written an introduction for a new book of Austin Osman Spare's The Book of Pleasure, which I was very happy to do an introduction for. Those are the things that keep me busy. Those are the main three things.